I am glad I retired when I did. I feel like I have less free time than I did in my career - and I was overly busy during my career. But that's because I've filled my time with learning and projects. I've slowly been learning not to put the same pressure on myself to get projects done that I did during my career (that was a real problem when I first retired). As I get better at giving myself some space, things get more fun / fulfilling. Even though it feels busier, it feels far less stressful.
My projects are mostly home maintenance / upgrades. I'm also spending some time on code + music... a couple of my friends are musicians who have helped inspire me to learn more on the music side. I enjoy playing with sound synthesis in code. I haven't made anything I'd think of as music yet, but that might come someday. I also volunteered to take over all the tech at our tiny town's all-volunteer library. Little did I know that the previous person had written their own library management web-app in bash scripts, but it's quite robust.
The thing I was most afraid of missing before retiring was mentoring. There are specific people I really enjoy mentoring. I talked to one of them about my fear and they asked if we could continue after I retired. It hadn't even occurred to me that there was such an option (of course there is!). So, I do 3-5 video chats a week with mentees (3 are weekly, 2 are monthly, and others are ad-hoc). My rule is that they have to be people I wouldn't take money from - that keeps my retirement honest. And the line between mentee and friend blurs significantly now, which is even better. Those people are keeping me young (they are all 25-35 years old) and reminding me how nice it is to be retired as they tell me about stressful situations at work.
In the meantime I’ve created all the projects I wanted to work on while I was working a 9-5. That’s been fulfilling and fun! And if a project isn’t I can always just stop or change it.
Tech stack can be seen here
Retiring was easy. I do what I want when I want, and I belong to the set of people that believe if I get bored it's my own fault. I have time for health, friends, family, and games, and all to the degree that I want.
My spending is on a budget, but that's ok
In theory I still have 17 years to go before being able to officially retire. I'm a bit too scared of the future to get disconnected from the job market yet. Also I still love working on technical problems and new tech, even though I absolutely hate the political bullshit and JIRA treadmill that go around nice tech in most jobs nowadays. My patience is getting tested every day.
The transition was easy. As a consultant, I gradually took on less paid work for other people and more things for myself. My house & yard take up a lot of time, and I mentor my college-age kids and a neighborhood teenager.
I seem somehow, partly because of some mild volunteering maybe, to have less free time than before! I am going to be spending half a Friday admiring new electric garbage trucks down at the local waste centre soon as part of this for example...
I fully support the idea of early retirement via FIRE. Even if a person doesn’t decide to actually retire, having the freedom to do so is an amazing feeling. Similarly, the current freedom I have to continue being semi-retired, go back to work, or just sit around playing video games feels amazing. It makes the insane amount of effort that I put in for a decade worth it.
I live nomadically in a campervan I built and guide raft trips and volunteer doing whitewater rescue now. However, I missed building things enough that I picked up another software job last year. I like building tiny-houses and campervans too, but as much as I hate staring at computer screens I'm just too addicted to the crazy leverage my efforts in software have to give that up it turns out! The jobs are way more fun too when you care not at all about getting fired.